On Saturday VIFF recognized the best among its BC and Canadian films. One film took both awards.
Edge of the Knife is the Haida-language telling of an old myth about a man turned into the wildman called Gaagiixid. I gave it a very positive review last Wednesday. It’s still up here on the site.
For the start of this second week at VIFF I’m recommending some of the smaller films that are not well-known yet but should be. Well, except for one of the six. You’ll see below.
The choices are:
Happy as Lazzaro
Cold War
Quiet Killing
Patrimony
Bel Canto
HAPPY AS LAZZARO: On the one hand, this is a sunny tale from rural Italy, a fable set among peasants. But it’s also a sharp social critique, comparing class-based injustice over the ages. There’s substance here besides the warmth and color. We first encounter it on a tobacco farm. There’s a wedding, lots of music, hard work in the daytime and the ever present need to keep the wolf that’s roaming the area away from the henhouse. We soon get a hasher picture. These people are sharecroppers working for the Marchesa for little money. Her malcontent son drifts by on the privileges of his class. He becomes friends with a young peasant and has him help him stage his own kidnapping.
A number of plot points later and the peasants are living as homeless people in the city. They sell stolen goods, some of them taken from the now abandoned farm. The banks have shut it down. The film equates them with the imperious owners in the feudal system that somehow survived in the area. At least that’s what I made of this rambling and fantasy-filled movie. It’s enjoyable and marvelous, written and directed by Alice Rohrwacher who was born in Italy and has transposed characters who feel like they’re somewhere between reality and mythology to the big screen. (Screens Tues 9 pm)
COLD WAR: Best director award at Cannes this year and now chosen as Poland’s submission to the Academy Awards. And not with a low-chance either. Pawel Pawlikowski’s last one, Ida, won the Oscar for best foreign language film back in 2015. But beyond all that, people should see this one because it’s a wonderful film, brisk in its pacing, beautiful to look at in crisp black and white and best of all emotionally absorbing. This is one of those classic love stories that stretches through decades and countries but falls victim to circumstances time after time.
Wiktor and Zula meet in 1949 as Poland is still trying to recover from World War II, specifically at a state-sponsored folk music and dance troupe. He records folk songs; she joins as a singer and soon rises to be the star. They become lovers but within a few years separate because the troupe is ordered to sing material in praise of the Stalinist regime. (This is all modeled on a real performing group and on the director’s own parents). He defects to Paris. She marries an Italian and gets out that way but they see each other again briefly in Yugoslavia and then re-unite in Paris. She sings with a jazz band, he’s depressed. Both end up back in Poland where he’s arrested for defecting and she re-marries for status. It’s a twisty, winding story that’ll keep you engrossed all the way. The love story is engaging and the acting by Tomasz Kot as Wiktor and Joanna Kulig as Zula is superb. (Screen Tues evening)
QUIET KILLING: This is not the happiest film at the festival but it is one to see. Grim as it gets, it has information all Canadians should be more aware of. Hundreds of Indigenous women have been killed or gone missing over the years, maybe thousands. It’s hard to put a real number on it but it is clear that Indigenous women are something like eight times more likely to be murdered than others. This film by Kim O’bomsawin explores why and lays much of the blame on the legacy of the residential schools. That comes out now and then in the heartrending stories she gets from women, abused sex workers, men who admit to taking out their frustrations through violence on their family and more.
There are stories from Winnipeg, Val D’Or, Quebec and from right here, from the downtown eastside. Willie Pickton is mentioned but the really moving stories are from people most of us don’t know. Angel Gates tells tales of her sex trade work including her first ever, when she was only 12. It’s uncomfortable to hear but it, like the stories from several others, will likely draw a very emotional reaction from you. That’ll be heightened when Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond details how the system fails young people who end up down there. She’s the former BC Representative for Children and Youth, now head of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at UBC. It’s a solid film with quite an impact. And expect more: the director and several of the people seen in the film will be there when it screens this evening. (6:15 at SFU)
PATRIMONY: No this is not a blast at a male-dominated social system. It’s a fun and quite affecting road movie and a mother-daughter reconciliation from the Czech republic. Sure, a man starts it going, but he’s just died at the start of the film and it’s his life that we, and the two women, are exploring. Specifically, what is the meaning of that child’s drawing found in an old jacket that’s being tossed out. It says Tomas on the back. Did dad have another child somewhere, asks his daughter (Tatiana Vilhelmová). Mom (Eliška Balzerová) dismisses the idea but agrees to come along anyway to visit some of his old women friends.
Prepare for several twists in this quest, dead-ends, false leads and surprises. Mother and daughter, driving a classic Czech car called a Volga, get to know each other better through several talks along the way and their visits with a haughty rich woman in a super-modern house, another in a retirement home, a third with a senile husband. The tone is light through all this. Then a super surprise. This film takes you effortlessly through a range of moods. It’s a comedy with some bite. (Screens Tues afternoon)
BEL CANTO: I’m not really recommending this one but if you want to a prime example of good people getting together and making an almost mess of things, here it is. The story from a popular novel is set in a Latin American country where a swanky government affair is crashed by revolutionaries. (Something like it did happen in Peru but no country is specified here). A Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe) has promised to invest in a new factory if his favorite opera singer can be there to help celebrate. Enter Julianne Moore, lip synching to Renee Fleming’s voice (sometimes not too badly).
The film directed by comedy-specialist Paul Weitz has an unfortunate habit of failing to build up to events. He lets them just pop up and try to convince us. So the singer and the industrialist fall in love. So does his translator and one of the rebels, the young woman. German actor Sebastian Koch arrives as a Red Cross worker trying to de-fuse the situation before the army steps in. His best idea is only mentioned, not considered or even dismissed, it seems. It’s an example of how clumsy this film is and how little of it has you believing in it. There’s not much tension either but to its credit it suggests some sympathy for the rebels, even as disorganized and close to inept they are. (Tonight, Mon, evening and Thurs afternoon)